Amber Frias: The Reporter Who Started in the Control Room Before She Ever Went On Camera

Most television reporters start their careers in front of a camera. Amber Frias started hers behind one — running graphics, lighting, and studio coding for someone else’s newscast before she ever filed a story of her own. That behind-the-scenes start is part of what makes her current role unusual: she’s now a bilingual general assignment reporter for NBC4 (KNBC) and Telemundo 52 (KVEA) in Los Angeles, filing daily live field reports in English for “Today in LA” and separate Spanish-language coverage for Telemundo — in the same Southern California market she grew up in.

Quick Facts

A Cal Poly Pomona Education, Built Around Campus Media

Frias studied journalism at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and used her time there to build hands-on media experience rather than just coursework. She wrote for the student newspaper, The Poly Post, and co-founded Cal Poly Pomona’s first online radio station, CPP RadioActive, serving as a founding member and secretary of its board. In that role she helped organize live performances and gave local musicians airtime on campus — early evidence of the same production instincts she’d later put to use in a professional control room.

Starting Behind the Camera in Bakersfield

Frias’s first television job wasn’t reporting at all. She joined KGET 17 News in Bakersfield, California, as a technical director, a role she held for close to two years. Technical directors run the control room during a live broadcast — switching camera feeds, timing segments, and keeping a newscast on air in real time — and the job gave Frias a working understanding of how a broadcast actually comes together before she ever appeared in one herself.

Helping Launch a New Station in San Diego

From Bakersfield, Frias relocated to San Diego to help stand up a brand-new Telemundo station from the ground up. She built graphics, designed studio lighting patterns, and worked on broadcast coding as part of the launch team — production work that helped get the station’s first newscast on air. That newscast went on to win an Emmy in its debut year, giving Frias an Emmy credit before she’d filed a single on-air story of her own.

Making the Jump to Reporting

In July 2018, Frias returned to KGET 17 News in Bakersfield — this time as a full-time multimedia journalist rather than a control-room hire. Over roughly two years there, she covered local community stories and regional policy issues, also appearing on KGET’s sister station, Telemundo 17.3. She then moved to FOX5 (KSWB-TV) and Telemundo in San Diego, where she spent about three and a half years as a field reporter covering the border region — a beat that put her in front of some of the most consistently newsworthy stories in Southern California broadcasting, from cross-border immigration cases to breaking regional news. Her work with the San Diego team earned a Golden Mike Award, a regional broadcasting honor, for live co-anchoring.

Coming Home: NBC4 and Telemundo 52 Los Angeles

Frias joined the NBC Los Angeles newsroom in May 2022, a homecoming to the Southern California market where she grew up. As a bilingual reporter for both NBC4 and Telemundo 52, she files separate English and Spanish-language versions of her stories — sometimes of the exact same event, as with her dual-language reporting on a South Coast Air Quality Management District hearing over the Boyle Heights cold-storage warehouse fire. Her recent coverage spans a wide range of Southern California news: Orange County’s aggressive West Nile virus season, the theft of donated supplies from an Orange County nonprofit that serves children of incarcerated parents, the case of Narciso Barranco — an undocumented father whose three sons served in the U.S. Marines — following his federal detention, and a fatal shooting and body discovery in Chino Hills. She’s an active member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

A Résumé Built From the Ground Up

What separates Frias’s path from a lot of on-air reporters is that she learned the mechanics of a newscast first — literally building one from the control room and the construction crew before she ever stood in front of a camera. That technical grounding, combined with years of border-region field reporting in San Diego, feeds directly into the bilingual, dual-platform reporting she does now for NBC4 and Telemundo 52: she isn’t simply translating her own stories, she’s producing two versions of the news for two different audiences in the same market, in real time.

FAQ

What does Amber Frias do at NBC4? She’s a general assignment reporter filing bilingual coverage for NBC4 (English) and Telemundo 52 (Spanish) in Los Angeles, including daily live field reports for “Today in LA.”

Where did Amber Frias work before NBC Los Angeles? She worked at KGET 17 News in Bakersfield, first as a technical director and later as a multimedia journalist, and spent about three and a half years as a field reporter for FOX5 and Telemundo in San Diego.

What did Amber Frias study in college? She studied journalism at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where she wrote for The Poly Post and co-founded the campus’s first online radio station, CPP RadioActive.

When did Amber Frias join NBC4 and Telemundo 52? She joined the NBC Los Angeles newsroom in May 2022.

A Reporter Who Learned the Broadcast From the Inside Out

Amber Frias’s career didn’t start with a live shot — it started with a control-room shift in Bakersfield and a construction job building a station’s first broadcast in San Diego. That path from technical production into field reporting, and eventually into bilingual coverage in her home market, is a less common route into local news than the standard on-camera-from-day-one résumé, and it shows in how her current reporting operates: two languages, two stations, and a working knowledge of everything happening behind the anchor desk.